by Eli Lake
THE NEW YORK SUN

WASHINGTON — The Bush admin­is­tra­tion is qui­etly weigh­ing the prospect of reach­ing out to the party that founded mod­ern polit­i­cal Islam, the Mus­lim Brotherhood.

Still in its early stages and below the radar, the cur­rent Amer­i­can delib­er­a­tions and diplo­macy with the orga­ni­za­tion, known in Ara­bic as Ikhwan, take on new sig­nif­i­cance in light of Hamas’s suc­cess­ful coup in Gaza last week. The Egypt­ian Mus­lim Broth­er­hood is widely reported to have helped cre­ate Hamas in 1982.

Today the State Department’s Bureau of Intel­li­gence and Research will host a meet­ing with other rep­re­sen­ta­tives of the intel­li­gence com­mu­nity to dis­cuss open­ing more for­mal chan­nels to the broth­ers. Ear­lier this year, the National Intel­li­gence Coun­cil received a paper it had com­mis­sioned on the his­tory of the Mus­lim Broth­er­hood by a scholar at the Nixon Cen­ter, Robert Leiken, who is invited to the State Depart­ment meet­ing today to present the case for engage­ment. On April 7, con­gres­sional lead­ers such as Rep. Steny Hoyer of Mary­land, the Demo­c­ra­tic whip, attended a recep­tion where some rep­re­sen­ta­tives of the broth­ers were present. The recep­tion was hosted at the res­i­dence in Cairo of the Amer­i­can ambas­sador to Egypt, Fran­cis Ric­cia­r­done, a deci­sion that indi­cates a change in policy.

The National Secu­rity Coun­cil and State Depart­ment already meet indi­rectly with the Syr­ian Mus­lim Broth­er­hood through dis­cus­sions with a new Syr­ian oppo­si­tion group cre­ated in 2006 known as the National Sal­va­tion Front. Mean­while, Iraq’s vice pres­i­dent, Tariq al-Hashemi, is a leader of Iraq’s chap­ter of the Mus­lim Broth­er­hood. His party, known as the Iraqi Islamic Party, has played a role in the Iraqi gov­ern­ment since it was invited to join the Iraqi Gov­ern­ing Coun­cil in 2003.

These devel­op­ments, in light of Hamas’s con­trol of Gaza, sug­gest that Pres­i­dent Bush — who has been care­ful to dis­tin­guish the war on ter­ror from a war on Islam — has done more than any of his pre­de­ces­sors to accept the move­ment fight­ing for the merger of mosque and state in the Mid­dle East.

Should Mr. Bush ask his diplo­mats to forge new chan­nels to the Mus­lim Broth­er­hood it would also be a recog­ni­tion of the gains their par­ties have made in elec­tions in the last three years. In Egypt, Iraq, and the Pales­tin­ian ter­ri­to­ries, Islamist par­ties trounced their sec­u­lar rivals. In part this was because these par­ties offered an uncor­rupt alter­na­tive to the more sec­u­lar par­ties in power, but some advo­cates inside the admin­is­tra­tion also say it reflects a tan­gi­ble momen­tum for par­ties that seek to cre­ate Islamic republics. One State Depart­ment offi­cial yes­ter­day said, “Our pol­icy has to change from more democ­racy, fewer headscarves.”

Nonethe­less, admin­is­tra­tion offi­cials this week also stressed that no deci­sions have been made as to a new ini­tia­tive. One lead­ing Euro­pean Islamist, Tariq Ramadan, who is the grand­son of the founder of the Mus­lim Broth­er­hood, is being denied a visa to assume a pro­fes­sor­ship he has been offered at Notre Dame Uni­ver­sity. The pol­icy debate inside the admin­is­tra­tion is also con­tentious, with law enforce­ment agen­cies such as the FBI skep­ti­cal that the Mus­lim Broth­er­hood is not clan­des­tinely more involved in sup­port­ing vio­lent jihad than the organization’s emis­saries let on.

A State Depart­ment spokesman for the Bureau of Near East Affairs, David Foley, con­firmed the meet­ing Wednes­day to dis­cuss a new approach to the Mus­lim Broth­er­hood. “We do these sem­i­nars, they help inform the pol­icy mak­ing process. I am not sug­gest­ing some­one would decide on a new pol­icy on the Mus­lim Broth­er­hood as a result of this,” he said. “This is the kind of con­sul­ta­tions we often do. When there are alter­na­tive views, let’s hear both sides. We are cer­tainly will­ing to lis­ten to voices from the outside.”

Mak­ing the case today for out­reach is Mr. Leiken, who co-authored with Steve Brooke a paper for the March-April issue of For­eign Affairs titled, “The Mod­er­ate Mus­lim Broth­er­hood.” That paper argues that Ikhwan has drawn con­tempt from vio­lent Islamists such as Al Qaeda for its gen­eral dis­avowal of armed strug­gle. Trac­ing its his­tory to its found­ing, the paper says the group today, par­tic­u­larly in Egypt, is gen­uine in its desire to par­tic­i­pate in demo­c­ra­tic politics.

Mr. Leiken said yes­ter­day that there are two rea­sons why Amer­ica should begin to rethink its pro­hi­bi­tion of meet­ing with the broth­ers. “A new pol­icy begins to com­bat some of our iso­la­tion in the Mus­lim world. I see the Mus­lim broth­er­hood, par­tic­u­larly in Egypt, as hav­ing what the com­mu­nists used to call a two-line strug­gle, between mod­er­ate and dog­matic fac­tions. Our out­reach would help the mod­er­ates. That would strengthen those forces who are most will­ing to rec­og­nize the fact of Israel’s exis­tence and more democratic.”

Mr. Leiken is a Har­vard grad­u­ate and long­time expert on Latin Amer­ica who broke with the hard left in the 1980s to oppose the San­din­istas in Nicaragua and who became asso­ci­ated with Social Democ­rats such as Penn Kem­ble and Joshua Muravchick. He said he thinks diplo­macy with Ikhwan could help us help them to mod­er­ate Hamas. “It is con­ceiv­able that the Egypt­ian Mus­lim Broth­er­hood, aware Gaza could serve as an index, will try use its influ­ence to get Hamas to be con­struc­tive,” he said. The Egypt­ian gov­ern­ment has used the Mus­lim Broth­ers for at least 10 years as a back chan­nel to Hamas.

Mr. Leiken’s For­eign Affairs paper and clas­si­fied study for the National Intel­li­gence Coun­cil has got­ten the atten­tion of senior National Secu­rity Coun­cil offi­cials and Sec­re­tary of State Rice, accord­ing to two admin­is­tra­tion officials.

“The NIC asked me to pro­vide an analy­sis of the Mus­lim Broth­er­hood and I was happy to oblige,” Mr. Leiken said.

Argu­ing against a new pol­icy on the broth­ers today will be a Hud­son Insti­tute expert on Islam, Hil­lel Frad­kin. Mr. Frad­kin declined to com­ment on his pre­sen­ta­tion ahead of the meet­ing. A col­league of his at the insti­tute who has also taken a skep­ti­cal view of the broth­ers, Zeyno Baran, did say she was wor­ried about a new direc­tion by the Bush administration.

“The think­ing is that to deal with ter­ror­ism, we need to deal with Mus­lims who will take care of their com­mu­ni­ties so there will not be peo­ple here and there doing ter­ror­ism,” she said. “So we treat the broth­er­hood like an umbrella orga­ni­za­tion, like the Coun­cil on Amer­i­can Islamic Rela­tions or the Islamic Soci­ety of North Amer­ica. You make them part­ners. They might Islamize the Mus­lims, but it’s okay because they can think or do what they want as long as they are not vio­lent. That is the mis­un­der­stand­ing and mistake.”

The issue of the Mus­lim Broth­er­hood has also come up in the pres­i­den­tial con­test for 2008. At the May 3 debate of Repub­li­can con­tenders for the pres­i­den­tial nom­i­na­tion, a for­mer Mass­a­chu­setts gov­er­nor, Mitt Rom­ney, included the Mus­lim Broth­er­hood as a com­po­nent of the “world­wide jihadist threat.”

“This is about Shia and Sunni. This is about Hezbol­lah and Hamas and Al Qaeda and the Mus­lim Broth­er­hood. This is the world­wide jihadist effort to try and cause the col­lapse of all mod­er­ate Islamic gov­ern­ments and replace them with a caliphate,” he said in response to a ques­tion about what he would do to cap­ture Osama bin Laden.

One of the more con­tentious issues with the Mus­lim Broth­er­hood is whether the group was con­nected to the 1981 assas­si­na­tion of an Egypt­ian pres­i­dent, Anwar Sadat. This reporter was told by lead­ers of the group last year that the ex-president’s killers were from a break­away fac­tion known as the Islamic Group and that his mur­der was not con­doned by Ikhwan. Sadat soft­ened the gov­ern­ment pol­icy against the broth­ers in the early 1970s, allow­ing them to orga­nize in uni­ver­si­ties, a deci­sion many of the Broth­er­hood lead­ers in Cairo credit with lay­ing the foun­da­tion for their gai
ns in the 2005 par­lia­men­tary elections.